Primacy is the most important decision facing news editors on a daily basis. What stories do they want to bring attention to? Newspapers can showcase their best content by placing it on the front page, above the fold. Television news programs can place it on the chyron at the bottom of the screen, boldly demanding the attention of viewers. And websites showcase their important stories with… Read More

Product visualization startup Cylindo has raised $1 million in new funding.
CEO Janus Jagd told me the company emerged from his own struggles moving into a new apartment, where he and his girlfriend wanted to visualize how their living room would look with a bunch of new furniture. To do that, Jagd said he built a 3D room model on his own and gave it to furniture merchants. Read More

Y Combinator-backed TeamNote is building an enterprise communication app that isn’t so much focused on the team, but on helping home base get important information to and from workers in the field. Read More

If you’ve ever dreamt of pulling a Little Rascals and riding down a massive hill on a wooden scooter, have we got a Kickstarter for you. The PlyFly Go-Kart is a flat-pack built-it-yourself go-kart that runs on a gasoline engine and can go up to 25 miles per hour. The kit is made of cut wood and assembles in about a day. It includes a 2.5 or 4 HP gas engine for maximum rev action.
The… Read More

BitTorrent is today taking one more step ahead in its bid to create a revenue-generating business out of its peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Sync, the desktop and mobile file synchronising service that BitTorrent presents as an alternative to cloud-based services like Dropbox, is today exiting beta as Sync 2.0. As part of that, BitTorrent is introducing a business-focused Pro tier… Read More

Last week we reported that on-demand valet startup Luxe had raised $20 million in Series A funding from Venrock Partners and Redpoint Ventures to expand its service into new markets. Today the company is confirming that funding, while also providing a bit more detail about where and how it hopes to grow. Read More

Imagine never having to buy new and expensive hardware to upgrade your personal computer with more speed and storage space. That’s the vision behind Y Combinator-backed Paperspace, a new company launching today, which is building a full, personal computer that lives in the cloud, which you access from any web browser. Similar, to some extent, to enterprise-grade solutions like… Read More

Security experts were abuzz last month in anticipation of President Obama’s proposal for new federal regulations that would concentrate on bolstering the nation’s stance on cybersecurity. Last year was witness to a number of high-profile breaches, which shone a light on the possibility of nation-state-backed cyberattacks and espionage and even drove the federal government to… Read More

Rumors that Google feels threatened by the fast-paced rise of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which has built its own UI atop Android and in China also offers its own app store (rather than pre-loading Google Play), were presumably front of mind for Xiaomi VP and former Google employee Hugo Barra today. Read More

As more business moves online, service industry professionals are leveraging new tools to improve how they connect with their customers. To serve those customers, Booker has raised $35 million in new funding to help small- and medium-sized businesses providing services in the offline world to manage customer relationships online. Read More

In one of the craziest sell-offs in Silicon Valley history, PCH International has closed its acquisition of e-commerce site Fab. The deal, which we first reported back in November, was announced today as a stock-and-cash deal for an undisclosed amount.
According to our sources, Fab was selling to PCH for around $15 million. That price is a fire sale for the remaining assets of the company after… Read More

Crowdsourced driving navigation app Waze is getting a boost from parent company Google at this year’s Mobile World Congress – the free app is now included in the section of apps that make up Google Mobile Services, or the pre-installation software bundle Google offers to smartphone and device OEMs building Android gadgets.
The GMS designation means that Waze can join the likes… Read More

Pebble announced Pebble Time last week, the next-generation version of its Pebble smartwatch, and today it’s revealing another new product: Pebble Time Steel. This is the stainless steel version of the Pebble Time, boasting the same interface and software, but in a machined metal case that comes in silver, gold and black finishes, and that also manages to add three days to maximum… Read More

Publishing conglomerates Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are facing tough times this quarter as ebook sales fell and total profit dropped 5.6% at S&S and approximately 12% for RPH. The potential culprits? A lack of blockbuster books and low ebook sales.
While ebooks sales are still dwarfed by paperback and hardback sales, publishers are now seeing even less revenue from… Read More

Finland’s Jolla, the plucky startup that’s built its own mobile OS, called Sailfish, atop the Mer open source project, is showing off its forthcoming, crowdsourced tablet here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’s the follow up to Jolla’s first device, the eponymous Jolla smartphone, which was released at the end of 2013. Read More

Blackberry was once the big dawg in mobile phones. It was in the hands of practically every knowledge worker on the planet, but its days of dominance began a precipitous drop after Apple brought the iPhone to market in 2007 and Android followed in 2008, and today it’s a tiny blip on the smartphone marketshare radar. That’s why it’s interesting that a new company, Silent… Read More

Montblanc, a Swiss luxury company, recently announced a little add-on to its mechanical watch line – the e-Strap, a small OLED system that displays notifications on the bottom of your watch band. I snorted at the concept back in January but now we get to nod sagely at the implementation.
To be clear I don’t think Montblanc is doing anything wrong here. They know smartwatches… Read More